Disney Discloses A Bunch Of User Stats, But Ignores The Only Important One

from the see-no-evil dept

Disney Mobile launched its MVNO for paranoid parents a year ago, and for its first birthday, it released some statistics about its subscriber base. It says that 30 percent of its paranoid-parent subs use the GPS tracking feature to keep tabs on their kids, with 70 percent of the tracking requests coming from mobile handsets and the rest from the web. This goes on for a bit, until you realize that Disney's left out the only stat that really matters to it: the number of subscribers it's been able to attract. Without those, anything else is meaningless. After the spectacular failure of Mobile ESPN, you'd think the company would realize this. Sure, Mobile ESPN users may have been willing to pay high prices and used a lot of data services, but there were so few of them that it didn't matter. Choosing not to disclose the number of subscribers does little to create any confidence that Disney Mobile has actually attracted any, or that it's doing anything other than biding time before it fails.